


Memorandums of Sin

by Daddy Tops (fig0newton)



Category: Descendants (Disney Movies)
Genre: Abuse, Blood, Bulimia, Character Study, Eating Disorders, F/F, Fairy Tale Elements, Isle of the Lost (Disney) is a Terrible Place, Pregnancy, Purging, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2020-06-25
Packaged: 2020-10-19 03:24:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20650403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fig0newton/pseuds/Daddy%20Tops
Summary: Snow White had lips as red as blood, they said. Evie was born into it.





	1. trinkets, tonics, and threats

Evie came into the world off the back of affliction.

She wasn’t an easy pregnancy. The Evil Queen was gifted a grim combination of maladies the Isle was loathe to correct: backache and heartburn, morning sickness and cravings, a topographical map of stretchmarks and twenty pounds that over time and motherhood would blossom into fifty

The Isle of the Lost conceded nothing, and this went twofold for the weak. The tyranny of expectant motherhood—her anger, her worry, her _shame_—compounded on the Queen, left her like a lit firecracker and cut her fuse into quarters.

Most times were dedicated to cursing the child, reminiscing on her previous life and its lofty heights, and then realizing just how low she had been plunged into thankless hell. This blessed vitriol fertilized in the heart of the island and sprouted an abundant harvest: the fruits of formidable vengeance, the flowers of barbarous intent, the seeds of clarified hate.

And then, when her harvest wallowed and rotted in its cage, the Evil Queen was left with only boastful naivety. In essence, _nothing_, save for the weakling child she carried and a handful of goblins left to serve.

She was to do it alone. There was no father to claim, just a series of probabilities, none having any claim to nobility. And if one was to speak of the manner of conception… no, she would not have that. Best to name no one, to maintain her status and go about different kinds of work in the future, or to be more careful when she must return to the piers.

In all reality, that would benefit the child—_her_ child as the former queen needed reminding at times—and it was almost the fashion of the Isle.

People would see her, and only her, and the queen would present in her crown and perhaps… perhaps she would have the goblins craft another. To be the queen mother of a bastard in Auradon would disastrous but here… it was narrowly an advantage.

So Evie’s path must be forced to set, the queen decided. She would inherit the monarchy, of course, but everything else needed securing.

Soon after reaching four months, the Evil Queen began ensuring her child’s future with whatever trinkets, tonics, and threats were available to her. Magic was fickle on the Isle, of course, but the active ingredients for quite a few friendlier recipes didn’t necessitate anything that couldn’t be found on the barges from Auradon (n the early days, it was easier to acquire; there were less hungry mouths and sticky fingers, less youth and the deft daring it wrought).

The queen would have a girl, of course, to marry into Auradon’s remaining noble branches. She would need to be narrowly second fairest, with features befitting a princess. She would have the intelligence for cunning, to win a price, a throne, and—above all else—the power her mother craved over any visceral object available to her.

For months, the Evil Queen tore through the pages of her alchemy books, brewed and drank with reckless abandon, and shunned all who might sully her work. In her body, she crafted to near perfection.

And, as her time neared, Evie almost killed her for it.

Her mother rarely told this snippet of their story, but Evie was able to pick off a hazy mosaic from her mother’s cave of mandates and intrusions. What she did know was that the cramps started a month early and never left, coming with the putrid blossoms of spring and remaining through the sweltering heat of June.

Pain would hit the Queen like lightning strikes without the forewarning thunder, jolting her from a moment’s reprieve and moving in on a wave of white-hot, radiating reality.

Day and night, the tumult of Evie’s impending arrival would sound, cacophonous and grotesque. It was a fitting announcement of the Evil Queen’s spawn. She might have been proud.

Once Maleficent had recounted her own birth tale (“Really, Queenie, do you plan on trusting _Dr. Facilier_? I always knew I could do better than any half-wit “doctor.” But if you don’t think you have the edge…”) the Queen knew she’d have to do the deed alone. What else was new?

Then the blood started. This the Queen _had_ mentioned in her macabre tale. It was rosy red like lips, bright like snow, filled with oxygen and that awful thing called life. The latter like she who always found a way to define Evie’s life.

The blood pooled between the Queen’s legs, weeping into the mattress that strained and sagged under her. Even then, she did not shout to the goblins, who’d offered no help of their own.

For all her talk of princes and kings, the overthrown queen didn’t think well of placing a totality of her trust in a man, not when it meant so much and he must know so little.

Evie thinks often of what her mother must have felt as the minutes trickled down her thighs. She must have felt weak, which seems odd, and _afraid_, which is even more surprising. But what else did her mother care for? Her beauty, and then—only then—her life, and both of these things before magic and power and certainly Evie.

Eventually, the Evil Queen, unescorted, birthed the child. (Evie never asked how, or why she didn’t just kill her then, or anything else she wondered. Wondering was for fantasies of being saved, the rare musings of revenge. Evie didn’t have the right to either of those, but she tried not to think about that.)

When the Queen’s new tool was detached and cleaned, she was inspected. There it was: the dark hair her mother so skillfully hid behind her drapery, the slight tan, the red lips that would speak in rapture and poison.

She was a Siren, this one, and she would bring all of Auradon to its knees.

But, for now, the child was peaceful. The queen pinched her smooth cheek, watched the blush settle underneath a red smudge of blood from her sullied fingers. The craven thing started blubbering again as the queen set her down between her splayed thighs, suddenly—no, rightfully—too exhausted to go on.

Evie was left to lay there for an indeterminant amount of time as her mother slept, both of them saturated in the crimson mess she’d wrought.

Snow White had lips as red as blood, they said. Evie was born into it.


	2. sour, worm, and spoil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello, it's been a while. hope you're well.
> 
> sadly, content warning for abuse + binging and purging + one brief hint at thoughts of suicide

As a child, the edge of Evie’s knowable universe was Goblin Warf.

The trek north would begin before dawn. Evie, scampering along behind a couple of goblins as they navigated the twilight-brushed dilapidation of her homeland: the popular tin low-rises, the lofty estates, the brick-bespectacled shops, and the varieties of ruin running through them. As they walked, the Isle’s cacophonous oppression increased to crescendo, until, in a moment of unease, the darkness lifted and **out** the horde jumped, thrusting into the bitter, salt, and free. This was the promise of sea air. This was the essence of the Isle.

By Evie’s time, the dock’s wooden battlements were dark with sewage, the buildings on its periphery crumbling. It was an orchestra unto itself, the rot turning infrastructure to instrument, the people playing them with boots and tongues and energy siphoned crafted in their own beings (she learns later that this is not scientifically possible; this becomes the one time Evie rejects scientific finding). Every footfall sent a plank wailing for a too-heavy load, for the crack and tear of release, for a tide that might send them swimming toward a milder place. Still, Monday mornings roared in with the stampede, the crush of decay, and the orgy of anticipation.

Invariably, however, loud Monday mornings became overcast afternoons. Victors would run home with pockets half-full of sour, worm, and spoil, leaving only the blankness of despair to blanket the hungry leftovers. Empty barges met hollow eyes. Some would not recover.

(On Tuesday morning, Mal and her ilk would search the new bloated, floating bodies for use. They never found much, except once a man whose face far too much resembled Evie’s. No one spoke of it.)

In banishment, Monday mornings became a journey to the end of Evie’s fuse.

They became hours standing before a cracked mirror, naked, cold, and empty, hearing but trying not to listen. They became measured diatribes, loose and circling mother and daughter. They became ammunition landing hard across a door Evie did not want to open.

And then they became the rub: _perfect_. Somehow, Evie never clarified what the word was. Aspiration. Description. Fantasy.

“A _perfect_ princess for a dashing prince.”

Secretly, Evie watched her mother to extrapolate what it wasn’t: balding, wrinkled, large. _Large_. The word rolled once and ricocheted off the tongue, but the Evil Queen would call it back, over and over and over again, as if trying to make it outweigh her daughter.

Evie learned not to mind; the word was hollow once she dug out its purpose.

Between the lessons and the hobbies and the bad habits Evie pretended not to have, she liked to watch from the castle windows. From the far side you could see the paths to Dragon Hall, watch the kids trudge to and fro. There were predictable patterns: spontaneously erupting fights, peels of truants between periods, two-day romances with spectacular velocity.

Mostly, Evie liked to picture what she might have had. Or who, perhaps, she might have had. Mostly, Evie liked to watch a girl with purple hair.

It began in the accidental, inconclusive way that allowed Evie to pretend everything was fine.

She was nine. She was nine and there were somehow cupcakes in the castle, whole and pure and hidden behind a stack of spell books in the freezer. Patches of mold clung to the edges of their dainty wrappers, little ants displaced in time, thrown back to the day Evie had found the bakery box at Goblin Warf.

She remembered it well. The feeling of cannibalizing her excitement as she skipped home, sure that no one should know her new secret. Before that, the wonderment and wondering. If perhaps her prince in magical Auradon had sent them, knowingly or not. If it was fate. After all, six was an important birthday.

(Two days later, the decree. And then just the castle.)

The memory was sick with sincerity. But it was purposeful. Why she was trapped here, why she’d missed so many birthdays since.

By now, it was as familiar as the pattern of mildew on castle curtains. Still, Evie wanted to lash out with it, to flay herself to dust so that she might cover every inch of the world, to see that dust carried by kind winds, to land just one particle of herself on a sandy beach somewhere in Auradon.

To never have to take that piece back.

The disparate shades of pink, green, and blue clashed at odd intervals, refusing to incorporate or dim their vibrancy. Evie delighted in the ocular discordance, in the sickly sweet sincerity of this idea she breed and squashed and breed again: _freedom_. She took a bite and lived as long as it lasted.

Time had almost absorbed the paper into dense cake, like water breaching mixed fibers. Evie could almost see the visage of tiny golden tiaras clumping in her mouth. White icing burned her throat like one of her mother’s frozen potions. She started the second cupcake.

It was incensed, pathetic, wasteful. She was being silly, gluttonous, and her mother’s anger would call her worse when it ran her down over this.

She bit into the third cupcake anyway.

And nothing happened. No rage, no sirens, no consequences. She didn’t stop herself from taking the fourth, nor the fifth. And on and on and on until Evie was staring at an empty white box, wondering if she was going to eat that too.

If there was pressure, it was internal, pressing at her ribs and organs and nerves. The pureness was unexpected, the brute physicality of being unbearably full, ceasing the flow of anything else. It bit her almost pleasantly. Evie was _almost_ content.

Then the waves began crashing in, nausea entirely unlike she’d felt it before. This was **need**, weighted down by _her_ and _her body_ and the supreme dissonance between the two. Only then did Evie realize the pressure she felt was splitting _pain_, a signal to _stop_ that she had taken down by barreling right through.

Eventually, she was leveled. Clumps of color shoved their way back out, catching in gridlocks that choked, latching onto flesh in impassioned attempts at _remaining_. This was futile; another round of sick would ultimately displace each mouthful and Evie would feel their acrid heft molding on her tongue before they were victoriously spat out, a splatter of _bluegreenpink_ to be rearranged when she emptied of reason again.

The heaves had her body contracting, collapsing. Evie shook and sweated and felt her fingers numb to overstitched ribbons. It became difficult to draw breath, difficult to stand, difficult to imagine this would end—that she would let it end. So she continued, nudging herself along where her body decided to fail.

It felt like violence. Like Evie needed violence, needed to feel the expanse, to let it flow inward and then to spectacularly rebuff it, to be empty by choice and choice alone.

It was a feeling—it was a feeling near to freedom.

There was a strange inhumanity to the Evil Queen, something “other” underlying her veneer.

Evie liked to think it was pain.

“You don’t know how lucky you are,” her mother would say, because at least her daughter got to grow up in a place where color didn’t matter so much as misdeed, where she could let her face know the sweet heat of sun without grievance, where she didn’t have to lust after snow-white skin to reach the standards of some fucking magic mirror.

Evie liked to think it was pain, but she knew that wasn’t the half of it. So, in her mind, she separated the woman into two: her mother and the queen.

Mother sang lullabies and rubbed salve into her calves; the Evil Queen laid the rice and watched Evie kneel. Mother taught her to dye and braid hair; the Evil Queen drowned her scalp in bleach where the locks had darkened to coal. Mother baked a makeshift birthday cake; the Evil Queen made her “earn it” in the days preceding.

Sometimes, Evie snuck down to the kitchen at night and watched her mother mixing their makeups. She was mesmerized by _her mother_: the stuffing escaping her stained apron, the swing of fat and skin trailing triceps, the line of muscle rippling where her forearms tensed. She looked powerful, but not regal. Not frightening.

(If this was largeness, Evie wanted it. Not on her person, but still, somehow, for herself.)

Blood.

It came unceremoniously, though damn-near purposefully unlike how Evie would have constructed it.

Nonetheless, the Evil Queen relished in her condition. “This is a good thing, child, no tears,” she barked, rubbing Evie’s back whilst allowing the peaks of her nails to tear at the girl’s skin. “You are now of age for betrothal.”

She said it like a gift. Evie supposed it was meant to be. But she had been looking into herself far too often of late, had been considering who she stared at from windows, had been seeing through the glint in her memories. The realization came like a whimper. Evie supposed it was meant to.

_In walks pain._

Like sickness, the waves hit and receded mercilessly, a constant ebb and flow Evie could not master. Unlike sickness, it alone did not dim her. Instead, it was a white-hot grip around her wrist, forcing Evie to contend with herself. There would be no magic spell, no bad habit, no kindness to catapult her back out of reality.

No, that would have to wait.

Her first period was the longest Evie had gone without relief since _it_ had started. She ate the apples and crackers and tea her mother provided, then curled up from the _fullness_ of it all. Her stomach was staging a rebellion, but Evie did not want to think, she did not want to feel anything.

(There was an itch, just under her skin, that Evie knew better than to indulge. She knew what would happen if the queen found a scar.)

So, Evie sat with those feelings, allowed passivity to engulf her. She watched from her tower’s window. Watched Mal, and Mal with Uma, and Mal with Harry, and Mal fighting Jay, and Mal and Jay beating Carlos.

A moment's honesty: _she watched Mal_.

_In walks pain._

“Disgusting, the way some women try to cheat for their figures,” said the Evil Queen.

Two months and a few sequential episodes later, Evie felt so foggy she could barely catch the words as they dribbled out.

“Disorder.”

“Deceit.”

“Debased.”

_Disorder_.

There was a name for it, then, and **others.** Evie both did and didn’t want to think about them (_did they deserve it? Did she?_), so she focused on descriptions her mother gave and nodded timely when the queen paused for it.

Later, Evie would use those words to expedite the process of reversal. It was heavenly. She shifted focus.

She shifted focus, until the next time she caught herself watching. 

“You’ve been distracted lately, dear.” The Evil Queen looked her up and down in the mirror, cataloging and comparing every proportion.

Evie hummed noncommittally, wondering what would be left in their basket today. She wanted bread, fish, maybe cheese, and—of course and especially—apples. She could keep down apples, most days.

“It gives you a very appealing doe-eyed look.”

Something sharpened in Evie then—maybe she didn’t want to be vacant, for once, maybe she wanted to breathe rage into the world—but she had long learned to dull herself when the roaring began. Call it compensatory behavior.

“Ah,” her mother chided. “Don’t lose it, now. You were almost perfect.”

“Yes, mother.”

The queen frowned. “Remind me to brew a teeth-whitening potion.”

“Yes, mother.”

“And to send for some fine fabrics. You’re growing by the day,” the queen said with palpable disdain.

“I’m sorry, mother.”

“Watch those contractions.” The Evil Queen pinched Evie lightly on the arm, tutting, before going back to sizing up (or perhaps wearing down) the rest of her. 

Sometimes, Evie thought about hurting people. Of knives and matches and magic, but of fists, too. What someone else’s flash would feel like if she torpedoed her red knuckles against it. How pleasurable it must be to beat the living shit out of another revolting blood sac.

Sometimes, Evie understood _why_. Why they were here. Why all of this anger and frustration was dangerous. Why she did the things she did to herself.

Sometimes, Evie wanted to do better.

One after another, the dominoes fell into a line. Evie was twelve when she admitted this life wasn’t normal. That her mother wasn’t normal, even by villain standards.

The Evil Queen liked to tell her “the rotten apple doesn’t fall too far from the poisoned tree.” When Evie lost herself, when she thought and did those horrible things, she worried it was in her, too.

She knew then that she needed to leave.

And she did. Twice, technically.

What came next was history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading. the next one should track their time on the isle after the events of the first book (i.e., the fun stuff).


End file.
